Golf Courses of the Mornington Peninsula

 

From Long Island Country Club near Frankston to Portsea Golf Club, the Mornington Peninsula is home to some of Australia’s finest golf courses. The region has been a favourite playground for Victorians since Federation and has been a focal point for new golf course development.

Many of the new courses have become instant classics and in the recent Golf Digest top 100 course rankings, eight courses from the Mornington Peninsula feature. The likes of Moonah Links was developed with the view of it acting as a regular venue for the Australian Open, while The Golf Club, St Andrews Beach, designed by eminent US architect Tom Doak, is a superb example of minimalism at its most splendid.

Complied by highly-respected Australian golf course architect Ross Perrett – a business partner of five-times British Open champion Peter Thomson – and photographer Kim Baker, Golf Courses of the Mornington Peninsula takes the reader on a comprehensive tour through the region’s many and varied golf courses. As well as visiting the likes of the recently crafted gems Moonah Links and St Andrews Beach, the book also stops off at some of more-established layouts like Flinders, which dates back to the early 1900s, as well as some of the region’s public access courses including Centenary Park which is undergoing a major overhaul to keep pace with the standards now being benchmarked throughout the industry.

A coffee-table publication stretching to 300 pages, Golf Courses of the Mornington Peninsula is organised into a series of essays on each course. The essays are contributed by a range of knowledgeable writers and are accompanied by stunning photographs courtesy of Baker. In most cases, Perrett indulges a little by picking out a particular favourite hole from each course, waxing lyrical about its design intricacies and playability.

As well as paying tribute to those who created some of Australian golf’s most impressive golf courses, the book also acknowledges the important role superintendents have played in helping foster the excellent reputation of the Mornington Peninsula courses.

Architect Tony Cashmore, in his essay on the formation of The Dunes, writes: “We both worked with Mark Gahan, a superb course superintendent who had worked on the Limestone Valley course construction and who we selected early on the basis of the utter simplicity of his hand-written application: ‘I know this land, and I want to do your course’. And surely this example can be viewed as good advice to every developer and course architect: get the right, knowledgeable and imaginative superintendent employed at the start of the construction program, because it will save untold headaches and lots of money later down the line!”

Never a truer word has been spoken.